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New Maglev Elevator Can Travel Horizontally, Vertically, and Diagonally (wired.co.uk)
An elevator that can move in any direction has been successfully tested by a German company named ThyssenKrupp. An anonymous reader quotes Wired UK:
The Multi is the first ropeless lift, built using the same magnetic levitation technology used in Japan's bullet train and proposed for the Hyperloop. In the same way the train slides along a track horizontally, the lift travels both vertically, horizontally and diagonally around a building riding an electromagnetic field, a system known as a linear drive. "If you can run a 500-tonne train on magnets at 500km/h you should be able to elevate a cabin of 500 kilograms or 1,000 kilograms at a speed of five metres per second," [ThyssenKrupp CEO Andreas] Schierenbeck said.
The elevator can cost 3 to 5 times more than a regular elevator -- but can handle higher buildings than a conventional elevator.
The elevator can cost 3 to 5 times more than a regular elevator -- but can handle higher buildings than a conventional elevator.
...and watch it FALL!
Next week on slashdot: phased energy weapons to be made available to security forces worldwide
Bit by bit, we're catching up with Star Wars technology.
That's like saying an American company named General Electric.
NT
What is this? A flash back to the turn of the 20th century without limitations?
Capt Kirk, Capt. James T. Kirk, you're wanted at Turbolift 1.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Ofcourse you'll get a -1.. your post has got nothing to do with the subject.
Wait, what? Elon Musk isn't involved? But.......how is that even possible? Everyone knows Musk is the world's only living inventor!
Wrong reference. This is clearly a Willy Wonka elevator.
The WONKAVATOR
PLEASE.
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
What happens if there is a power outage? The elevator loses power?
It will drop and everyone dies?
How do I know that this is real, and not just an implanted memory?
They should call it a Turbolift. Yes, as in Star Trek. Just don't give it an AI, please.
One way to think about elevators and high-rises is to start from the top. The uppermost part is a little building that only needs one elevator. As you add floors on the bottom they need more shafts so that you can fill and empty the building in a reasonable time. With conventional elevators, there is only one per shaft. (Although it can be more than one floor high.) At some point the next bottom floor you add will be all elevator shafts and unless you think you can make money from a more scenic view from the top, you stop. With this tech the elevators become cars on a vertical railway and can take on passengers without blocking shafts. Big gain.
On a 50 floor building an elevator 4'x6' will have a shaft a little larger plus a 10' waiting area in front of it, so say 15x8 or 120 feet square x 50 floors gives 6000 square feet. Times $1000 per square foot for grade A office space and your elevator is now taking up $6 million dollars worth of floor space.
Please let some kid named Charlie be the first to ride in it.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Came for the Star Trek reference. Was not disappointed. Thanks.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Huh, I was thinking of an entirely different movie...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
=Smidge=
Nah, it's clearly the inferior Star Trek version. Can't go squareways.
...and push the button to go right. In fact, this hospital is quite unique in that the floors are set up horizontally. This puts the first floor on the far right, with the second floor to its left and so on. My office is on the fifth floor, all the way to the left. I used all of my grandmother’s money to have it set up like that for a simple reason. If I stand directly to my sister’s left, the motion in space makes it so that as we move quickly from left to right, my penis finds itself in the same physical location as where her vagina was just a fraction of a second before. Aside from this brief interval, from a time-space continuum perspective it’s as if I have sexual relations with every person who steps in the elevator with me. This is impossible with traditional elevators that are required to move up and down instead of left and right.
Cut the electricity and that thing will just crash. Also, the power consumption is WAY too high compared to a regular elevator. No landlord will want that in their high rise building.
But will they have defocused temporal perception like the rest of the elevators in the galaxy?
There had better be chocolate at some of the stops or Mr. Wonka will come down hard with his prior art.
Why is Snark Required?
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is shielding, for those with Pacemakers this would be a no-go. I wasn't allowed anywhere near the magnetic catapult testing at Lakehurst :(
So how much cancer do I get by using and/or working/living in a building with this tech?
I've always wondered: Do compasses go crazy near these contraptions? Specifically things like the magneto compasses in phones and drones.
Was not even mentioned in the summary. You can run multiple cabins in the same shaft, saving precious floor space (and move the cabins horizontally if they need to pass each other, or you can just assign up and down shafts). Thus, for larger buildings this type of elevator can actually be a major cost saver.
a final step closer, problems start when you wake up INSIDE.
Willy Wonka is suing.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
This is a "Turbolift" and that's what it needs to be called. It's not a Great Glass Elevator at all and I don't know why anyone would get that impression. Nobody said anything about it flying up out of the building and soaring away on its own.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
WonkaVator.....
Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.
Far as I know, the Japanese commuter bullet train has wheels. They had an experimental high speed maglev on a separate test track but it's not in commercial service.
Build lift cabins as standardized people containers that can slide out of the building, onto a robocar rack that drives to the train station, into the maglev tube, to your destination building and floor.
The video in the source makes it pretty clear it is running on rails and just using the induction motor to move it. No magnetic levitation involved. For one thing if there was, it'd push the thing away from the track, which isn't a useful direction for an elevator.
It seems like a vertical, cog-based railway system should be able to do the same thing so I'm not sure the advantage of the induction motor here.
Somebody mentioned the limitation of traditional lifts having just one car per shaft. So... if you make two vertical shafts connected with horizontal shafts at the top and bottom you could have an elevator loop. Left shaft goes up, right shaft goes down (or the other way around if you're not in the UK). One lift every minute or so. This waiting time may allow for lifts that stop at every floor vs lifts that don't - based on demand. You'll need 5-10 lifts and you should be able to continuously serve the entire building.
I think even in Star Trek people used to wait for the Turbolift although the usual scenes showed instant availability.
... and airbags of course :)
I have been in reserve-your-floor elevators and 2-cars-per-shaft elevators. I am not looking forward to the Wonkavator, unless they make it extremely human-friendly. It sounds cool but...
The reserve-your-floor elevator would require floor selection by a keypad exterior to the cabin. It would refuse to accept other floor number entry from within the cabin, which is disconcerting if you just jump into a waiting cabin without entering a selection first. These were universally hated. The idea is the elevator is smarter than you and maximizes traffic but really it just was aggravating to anyone not used to it. (Customers and new employees)
The 2-cars-per-shaft elevator would stop and everyone would look uncomfortably at each other in a progressively claustrophobic space. Also your ears would tend to pop from the height.
I would feel a little better about 3D elevators if they would be guaranteed never to stop except in front of a door, and could be exited at any time if someone feels sick. If you tried to exit in an emergency would you be stuck in the middle of high voltage / EMF / mega-robot gears? The image of the exchanger gear is near from an engineering perspective in the way a funicular or trolley gear is, but you don't want to be climbing over one of those things. (maybe subject of a future James Bond movie?) If hacked you could literally lose people somewhere in a building. It brings so many potential neuroses I am not sure people will want to ride them. On the other hand for a factory they would be very cool.
And I am ALSO responsible for modding you down. Because your post is so flagrantly off-topic, it doesn't matter whether you're correct or not.
I have no objection to discussing politics or Islam, but I strongly object to changing every single topic to a discussion of your views of Islam.
...and I'm going to go back and moderate this post down as well, since a post discussing an off-topic post is also off-topic.
We had them since the late 60's in StarTrek right?
Witnessing the birth of the turbolift, a-la Star Trek. To those saying "watch it fall"... uhm... no.. for exactly as there are brakes that engage in the loss of power in a Star Trek turbolift... same thing here. All it takes is to have a solenoid set that, when power is NOT applied, clamps down. This can also be used to stabilise the lift when it is stopped at a door. These guys are probably just the first to make the turbolift concept work.
U.S. Navy has had contractors developing magnetic lifts for over 10 years: http://news.northropgrumman.co... (2005).
I demand that the in-motion indicator and control handles from ST-TOS, as well as the TOS dramatic music whenever you are riding in it.
They are experimenting with two adjacent shafts, one up and the other down. Cars move horizontally to transfer from on shaft to another at the top floor and the basement.
They are also moving the floor request button outside the car. Thus if three cars are going up, there is one request for floor A from floor B, only one car will stop at B and then at A. A very adaptable system, sort the passengers by destination before they enter a car, this alone doubles the capacity of elevators in large buildings.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
But with your friendly explanation ...
Neither reading nor watching videos (actually far more frustrating for us time-sensitive individuals) is necessary.
Thanks!
But do try to avoid the hate speech ;-(
ThyssenKrupp is the third largest elevator company on the planet. In the United States alone, they have over 30% market share and built the elevators for top landmarks including One World Trade Center and the Saint Louis Arch (they even have the Arch on their logo). The way the article is written, it sounds like a start-up, not one of the global elevator leaders. It's an important distinction as it adds a lot of credibility to the technology and the claims.
Safety considerations aside - with a normal lift the motor only has to work against cabin weight - counter weight. Even hydraulic lifts can build up pressure when the cabin is descdneing. WIth this design the linear motor has to do all the work lifting the cabin up so unless there's some sort of regenerative braking system when it comes down this is going to be horribly power hungry and inefficient just when buildings are being required to reduce their power usage.
Please call it a Turbolift!
So long as there are backup failsafe safety systems in place comparable or better than conventional elevators, sounds good to me. Also, please make the control system as unhackable as possible, and make the at least some of the safety systems completely separate from the main control system, so if it is hacked, they can't use the elevators as murder weapons/weapons of mass destruction? Thanks.
"Bridge!"
I assume these will be voice controlled, after all.
https://youtu.be/EHjTspVeLUI
"There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and
Now they just need an advanced AI that can see a few seconds into the future so they can arrive right before a passenger needs them.
Then they can go sulk in the basement.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You beat me to it. I had the same thought when I read that.
The WONKAVATOR
PLEASE.
Now that just gives me the Willy's.....
Major Conglomerate?
Admiral Appliance?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm sorry, what do YOU call a 95-story linear accelerator?
Sounds like a bloody giant goddamn space gun in disguise to me.
Probably could do double duty in some sort of civil defense program to drive off any aliens that attempt to molest the Earth.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What applies the arresting breaks in the vertical motion? One of the major safety features of modern elevators was invented way back in the 1800's. When the tension of the cable is removed, breaks are automatically engaged to keep the elevator from moving. Without a physical cable this needs to be electronic and will be prone to failure along with the same electronics that controls the magnets lift. No lift, no breaks? Or is there a power and controller redundancy built into its emergency system?
I realize that Raold Dahl's predates Douglas Adams's, but I assert that this is a Magrathean elevator.
Otherwise known as the Ray Rice-a-vator.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
"If you can run a 500-tonne train on magnets at 500km/h you should be able to elevate a cabin of 500 kilograms or 1,000 kilograms at a speed of five metres per second,"
i saw what you did there. you changed units on me! i don't want 5m/sec. i want 500km/h. give it to me!!
Sounds a lot like Star Trek turbo lifts. Anyway, as this company developed the German maglev train which was sold only once, they found one way to make a product out if it. As long as people build ridiculous tall houses such elevator might be a good idea.
Has anybody pointed out that the counter-weighted elevator is one of the most efficient modes of transportation we have? Energy input versus mass movement. I see maglev as adding cost without actually adding useful capabiity (but physics and economics are easily trumped by marketing).
Given almost every escalator I have ever seen is down for maintenance constantly INCLUDING ones by Thyssen-I think I will let this be a tech I wont be an early adopter ie user PERIOD.
Can't go squareways.
Or Wonkaways.